Recordings

Guillaume Du Fay: The Tenor Masses (Les messes à teneur)

Close miking recreates the intimate experience of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Renaissance singers

Distinguished by lively tempi, dynamic phrasing, and rhythmic energy

Generous, 2-CD set with a lavish booklet, including color images and liner notes in four languages

As important for defining a central genre in the early Renaissance as Haydn’s London Symphonies or Beethoven’s late string quartets were several hundred years later. Du Fay demonstrates a masterful handling of form in these large-scale works, creating music that is once beautiful and strange, self-assured and experimental.

De Orto and Josquin: Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490

Double album featuring sacred music by Renaissance composers living and working in Rome

Offers new interpretations of music by Josquin des Prez, including his famous Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales

Presents premiere recordings of works by Marbrianus de Orto, Gaspar van Weerbeke, and other scandalously understudied late fifteenth-century singer-composers employed in the newly built chapel of Pope Sixtus IV. In a space that overlooked frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino, they gathered around enormous choirbooks to sing one another’s masses, motets, and hymns. Cut Circle’s recording aims to capture the soundscape of the Sistine Chapel as Josquin knew it.